2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
More and more often I come across the fact that people do not fully understand, or even do not understand at all how Others are around. When I was a child, I wondered why people were acting differently, could not understand that they were different from me. This was just the beginning of the path of awareness and acceptance of Others as they are.
The thing is that each of us is a unique, unique personality, with its own set of characteristics, inclinations, values, needs, interests, conditions and development factors. Not to mention the physiological characteristics. Each of us has our own history, motives, aspirations.
Let me explain with the example of self-esteem. The vast majority experience tremendous stress and strain from comparing themselves to those around them. The system of self-worth is built on the basis of "how much better and more successful I am than others." Because of this, self-esteem is extremely unstable, because every day we meet new people, find ourselves in new situations, all the time we compare ourselves with our environment and how everyone coped with this or that task.
As a result, we get ups and downs, then a feeling of superiority, then a feeling of worthlessness. Anxiety grows and does not allow to fully develop their activities, to open up, or even paralyzes at all. Partially from this area, the question arises "What if I fail?" After all, there will always be someone who will be better, more effective and more successful. It is impossible to be the first in everything.
Thus, we get:
1) An all-consuming desire to be the first in their field. We narrow the criteria down to one manifestation - and the feeling of obsession makes us headlong, by all means, to ascend the podium.
2) We devalue those around us in order to feel our superiority against their background.
3) We perceive any assessment biasedly and react to it with hostility.
4) We perceive the entire environment as a hostile environment that requires fierce competition.
5) We feel numb before the activity (what if it doesn't work out or someone will cope better than me? Then self-esteem will slide even lower).
6) We close ourselves in and suppress our activity (it is better not even to try).
7) Irritation and aggression due to the success of others.
Why is this happening?
Usually we get this system of self-assessment as an inheritance from the family and loved ones. The educational system, in turn, is extremely powerful in supporting this way of thinking. Schools and universities impose comparison and assessment with each other, competition, without burdening themselves with paying attention to the individual, but building everything according to one factor, not allowing the development of an individual style of activity. This is what limits those who break out of the standards based on the arithmetic mean.
And, of course, work that requires you to perform tasks using standard methods and severely limiting individual options. After all, the same methods and styles of work and study are not suitable for everyone. This is why companies like Google and Apple that encourage creative thinking are so effective.
It is worth mentioning that society as a whole also contributes to an increase in anxiety and self-doubt. Since the dominant criterion for assessing the "goodness" of a person today is success, power, money. I will write about this in a separate article.
All this leads to the fact that we cease to perceive others as Others, but only through the prism of standardized, generally accepted criteria, forgetting about humanity.
What to do about it?
The way of thinking described above has shown its ineffectiveness due to the fact that it depends on an external factor, which is very unstable.
The decision will seem very simple, but in practice it is difficult to implement, since you will have to keep track of many of your thoughts and change your usual system of values from time to time.
It is more effective to evaluate yourself in comparison with yourself yesterday
It means comparing your personal successes and failures, your development over time, how you have changed over a certain period. Looking objectively at their development conditions, opportunities, features and results. This frame of reference is tied to internal factors, which are more stable than external ones. This allows you to see other people as Others and helps to perceive each more individually, reducing aggressiveness and criticism towards them. It also reduces anxiety, balances self-esteem and allows you to more effectively interact with the environment.
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